The visual motif of animal heads on pin-up models has become a theme (slash1 running gag) for me. I started down this path several years back, but I’ve really embraced it lately. A couple of recent examples:
Because I keep churning these out and because I’m using one as the cover for my forthcoming album, people are asking, “what’s that about, Ben?” That being, the fact that I keep putting animal heads on pin-up models in my collages.
Interestingly (to me, at least), some folks like it and others do not, so I want to reflect a little bit on where this theme comes from for me. Opinions vary. My wife, who is infinitely supportive of my various endeavors, doesn’t love this whole thing—though she finds some of the images more inviting than others. A friend from the open mic I like to play told me that at her house everyone but her reacted negatively to a sticker featuring one of these images. She likes it, and as the only woman in her household was surprised by the responses of her husband and male offspring. The sticker is a detail from the cover-art image for the forthcoming album, Candy Macabre—release date May 31!, which is the first collage I made in this vein:
I’m not sure why I made this image or exactly when I did so. It was probably somewhere between 2010 and 2015. I know I made it when I lived in Chicago, and I think it was during the Grappling Snark era. I usually don’t like the visual art I produce, or even if I do, I don’t want to see it often. This image has been an exception. I have it on display in my office rn.
I’ve written elsewhere about how I got into collage art, so it’s not surprising I made a collage, but I’m not sure what drew the (male!) lion head to the (female!) pin-up model body, but as soon as I saw that the images fit together, it immediately felt right or interesting or whatever. Also unusual is that in addition to cutting and assembling the images, I added a little bit of paint and ink to this one. I have done that only rarely, and I think, again, that this was the very first time. So, I like this one. It’s one of my favorite creative products that I’ve ever generated.
And yet, the divisiveness of the reactions to this and similar images makes sense to me. The divisiveness resonates because I also have mixed feelings about these images—even though I’m the one producing them. So I’m going to run through how I’m thinking about all this. Here goes:
I like it
The first, simplest, most self-contained explanation is that in a totally uncomplicated way, I like it2—it being in this case the animal-headed pin-up models (APMs? *sigh*). Of course, there’s more to unpack and that’s the point of this reflection, but we wouldn’t be having this conversation (which we are, in fact, not having—this being much more of a monologue than any kind of dialogue) if there weren’t this analysis-free, gut-level reaction on my part to the APMs.
It makes me uncomfortable
The other thing I like—and this shows up in the divisiveness among others’ reactions too—is that the APMs make me uncomfortable. I grew up in an overtly repressive environment3—evangelical Protestantism in the South during the 80s and 90s. In the delicious hypocrisy resulting from utterly dissonant world-views and media-consumption behaviors, sexually tantalizing images were simultaneously taboo AND constantly on-offer on television and in magazines. The message was:
Be compelled by these sexually tantalizing images, but be sure to deny—outwardly and internally—that you are compelled. If you fail to successfully navigate this paradox, you are damned.
It’s, of course, a game you can’t win. And the stakes couldn’t be higher: the fate of your immortal soul!
I’ve played a lot of games with similar structures over the years, and they leave a mark. Deep in my neural network there’s this vestigial-but-definitely-still-active, deeply-ingrained bit of programming that still responds when something risque is displayed. So that’s fun. I love experiences that put me in touch with the unconscious parts of my programming. So little of what we do is a matter of conscious control—even though we tend to vastly overestimate the extent to which we are in charge—and it’s always interesting to come into contact with the deep programming that—in fact—runs most of the show.
Repression makes a deep impression: The math of it all
The tension that these images help me access is best expressed as a proof:4
Women are objectified in numerous ways, including pin-ups, and…patriarchy, misogyny, etc., etc.
A blunt, unsophisticated way to represent this objectification is the literal visual de-humanization of replacing the pin-up model’s human head with an animal’s head.
Even while recognizing the problematic nature of the objectification of women in contemporaryish visual culture, I simultaneously acknowledge the influence of that culture (and so much more) on me and the resulting Pavlovian response to pin-ups—see the “I like it” section above.
The tension—among a) liking the pin-up images, b) knowing they are problematic, and c) recognizing the “critique” of the images (#2 above) is pitifully weak and hackneyed—keeps me interested.
The nexus:
So I just sit in the midst of all of that and oscillate. I don’t get, or at least haven’t yet gotten, resolution. I don’t really want it. I feel like I’m grappling with some stuff that is significant in mapping my own personal programming.
The paradoxical repression—of anything remotely sexual, alongside repeated visual indoctrination—that was one aspect of my milieu growing up resulted in the sentiment contained in the independent clause in #3 above (I like images of pin-up models) getting burned in very deeply—repression making a deep impression, so to speak.
But…
While I think sitting with this tension has value for me, I’m also aware that there’s a line somewhere between commenting on the problem (objectification, patriarchy, misogyny) and exacerbating the problem. And it’s possible that reproducing the images does, in some senses, more harm than good—in my own de-indoctrination, in terms of what I’m putting out into the world, etc. I don’t know. But it’s a real-time experience of my privilege that I have the opportunity to wonder where that line (between commentary and exacerbation/replication) lies.
I’m curious how you—my dear, dear readers, who have all (each and every one of you) read to the very bottom of this too-long, too-self-indulgently-naval-gaze-y post—react to these images and my reflections upon them.
My friend Robert, of Pelicans and Their Allies and Poplr—and who mastered the album—when I’m torturously trying to enunciate what I like (or don’t!) about a movie, book, song, whatever, he brings me back to the question, “Can’t you just like it?” You can. You should. But I also—for whatever reason—have to run the cogitation calcs or else I’m uneasy. But he makes a good point.
It’s worth reflecting on Foucault’s “Repressive Hypothesis” (the hypothesis being that while we think of ourselves as sexually repressed by a society that forbids us to speak about sexuality, we are actually compelled to engage in discourse about sex all the time.
My fascination with attempting to explain things via a series of numbered propositions is the result of my obsession with the Tractatus. It (numbering things) doesn’t work, but I will keep trying. That is my promise to you.